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1 France’s Dead in Australia An Historical Surveyi Edward Duyker Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre 12 April 2014 Consul-Général, ladies and gentlemen. I am very grateful to the Francophone Association Southern Sydney for the invitation to speak this afternoon. Events like this don’t just happen, Agnès Thenevin and Bob Head, in particular, have done a great deal to make it possible. But before I proceed any further, I have a more fundamental obligation. As part of the process of reconciliation with the indigenous inhabitants, it has become customary to begin proceedings such as this with either a welcome to country or an acknowledgement of the traditional owners of the land where an event takes places, in this case the Dharawal. I am honoured to have the opportunity to make that acknowledgement, however, given the scope of this address, I also believe that it is appropriate to acknowledge that we are to discuss French burials in the ancestral lands of the Nanda in Western Australia; the Kameygal, Bidjigal, Wanegal and Dyangadi in New South Wales; the Nuenone in Tasmania; and the traditional country of the Guugu Yimidir in Queensland. In most cultures where burial is practiced for the dead, there are sensitivities and concerns when remains are disturbed or threatened with disturbance. When the graves of servicemen (and women) lying in foreign fields are involved, the emotions can be deeply provoked. On 15 November 2001, news broke of a French Badgery’s Creek: a proposal to build a third airport for Paris at Chaulnes on the former battlefield of the Somme. Over the next few months, anger grew in Britain and Australia at the prospect 2 of marked and unmarked war graves being disturbed and a ‘sacred’, landscape being defiled. Australia had somewhere between 61 and 98 graves that were potentially vulnerable to disturbance in cemeteries at Fouquescourt, Bouchoir and Rossiers. Furthermore, it was possible that the WWII cemetery at Meharicourt might be affected. On 11 March 2002, there was a joint press release from Foreign Minister Alexander Downer and Veterans Affairs Minister, Dana Vale (the then Federal Member for Hughes), demanding full French consultation with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Bill Fisher, Australia’s Ambassador in Paris, was ordered to register Australia’s concerns directly with the French Government. Closer to home, on 13 March 2002, the Member for Miranda, Barry Collier, told the New South Wales Parliament that ‘each resting place is part of our nation. Each of those graves is a part of Australian history, culture and heritage, and each must be preserved and remain undisturbed’. He also stated that he was ‘appalled that the French Government would contemplate even for a moment building an airport on the graves of Australian war dead.’ Cliff Raatz, President of the Miranda RSL sub-branch, called the proposal ‘outrageous’ and circulated a petition ‘opposing the building of the airport and the subsequent insult to our war dead, their descendants and all Australians’. The following month, Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson also flew to Paris to make strong representations on the matter. Repeated assurances of respect for war graves were given by the French Government, but fell on deaf, sometimes Francophobic, ears. Ultimately assurances were unnecessary: plans for the airport at Chaulnes were abandoned in favour of enlarging Paris Charles de Gaulle. Undoubtedly local concern for war graves was a significant factor; one only has to visit this part of France to know that the declaration ‘N’oublions jamais l’Australie’ [Let us never forget Australia] is no mere 3 slogan. During the First World War, 59,342 Australian soldiers paid the ultimate sacrifice and contributed to a profound national trauma of loss and bereavement. Among these Australian servicemen killed on the Western Front was a member of my mother’s extended family and a member of my wife’s family. I also feel a broader sense of kinship with one of the Australians whose remains were discovered after ninety-two years in an unmarked grave at Fromelles in 2009: Alfred Victor Momphlait. His father was Mauritian and his niece on Kangaroo Island was a close family friend. Although there can never be any question of arithmetic symmetry, we too are the custodians of French servicemen’s graves here in Australia and our soil is the emotional focus of equally distant families. In most cases these young men died of disease rather than as a result of violence in the service of their country or as allies engaged in the same desperate struggle. Nevertheless, Australia is also the last resting place of French immigrants who were allied veterans of the First and Second World Wars. Despite this, we Australians have sometimes been guilty of the same actions that our politicians have accused the French of merely contemplating: disturbing and moving the remains of servicemen. Others have simply been lost or forgotten. We often use the words ‘Lest we forget’ to reiterate and reinforce historical memory and underline the tragedy of lives lost in our nation’s military service. As we approach the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, I would like to provide an historical overview of these French servicemen’s burials in Australia and suggest that we have a reciprocal obligation to honour and respect their graves and acknowledge their place in our 4 history. Indeed I could easily adapt Mr Collier’s words of March 2002: ‘each resting place is part of our nation. Each of those graves is a part of Australian history, culture and heritage, and each must be preserved’. So who are these individuals? The first Frenchman to be buried in Australia was an assistant-gunner named Massicot. I am sorry to say that I have not yet discovered his first name. We know that he was buried in the sand at the foot of the cliffs near Cape Levillain, on the north-eastern tip of Dirk Hartog Island, Shark Bay, on 30 March 1772, by a burial party under the command of a Sergeant Lafortune. Massicot died of scurvy aboard Louis Alesno de Saint-Alloüarn’s vessel of exploration, the Gros Ventre, which had crossed the Indian Ocean and sailed north along the Western Australian coast after separation from Kerguellen’s vessel La Fortune. The site of Massicot’s grave has not been found. There were two unsuccessful attempts to find it in early 1998, one a private expedition, the other by the Western Australian Museum. Instead, a 1766 Louis XV coin and two eighteenth-century French wine bottles (disappointingly without any wine or documents inside!) were found. The next Frenchman to die in Australia was also in naval service, but he was buried 3600 kilometres away on the coast of New South Wales. This was Claude-François- Joseph Receveur a Franciscan friar and former soldier serving as a naval chaplain and naturalist on Lapérouse’s expedition. He died here on 17 February 1788, not yet 31 years of age. A number of historians have suggested that Receveur was killed by Aborigines. I don’t accept this explanation. Like Governor Arthur Phillip and Watkin Tench, I believe that Receveur died as a result of a head wound he received earlier in 5 Samoa. I have argued elsewhere that he probably had a fatal, slowly accumulating subdural haematoma, possibly complicated by scurvy. Receveur was born in Noël-Cerneux, just a few kilometres from the Swiss border, and was the first Catholic priest and the first scientist to be buried in Australia. His grave on the northern shore of Botany Bay (near the present Lapérouse Museum) remains one of the oldest European monuments on the east coast of Australia. It was originally marked with a painted epitaph fixed to a tree trunk. A little less than a month after Lapérouse’s departure, Lieutenant William Bradley (c.1757–1833) visited Botany Bay and found that the grave marker was ‘torn down by the natives’. The inscription was ‘copied’ and Governor Phillip ordered that it be ‘engraved on a piece of copper and nailed in the place the other had been taken from’. The accounts of Governor Phillip, Watkin Tench and Surgeon John White (c.1756–1832) all confirm this was done. When Louis-Isidore Duperrey’s (1786–1865) expedition arrived in New South Wales on the Coquille in 1824, a number of the officers – including Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d’Urville (1790–1842) and Victor-Charles Lottin (1795–1858) – went in search of Receveur’s grave on Botany Bay. Lottin, recorded meeting the garrison of a corporal and two soldiers and asking them whether they knew of ‘a French tomb in the neighbourhood of their fort’. The corporal took Lottin and his companions to a place where the earth was raised and was covered with grass. They found no inscription, so on the trunk of an enormous Eucalyptus which shaded the site, they decided to carve the words: Près de cet arbre reposent les cendres du père Receveur, visité en mars 1824 [‘Near this tree lie the remains of Father Receveur, visited in March 1824]. The tree 6 was later used as a windbreak for a fire, but the carved inscription was saved thanks to the efforts of Simeon Pearce (1821–1886), later the first mayor of Randwick. It was then exhibited at the Exposition universelle, in Paris, in 1854. Soon after it became part of the collection of the Louvre and thence the nascent Musée de la Marine in Paris. Although the inscribed stump was loaned to the Lapérouse Museum in Sydney on its inception in 1988, it has since been ‘returned’ to Paris and replaced with a brass replica.

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